Remix.run Logo
tomwheeler 5 days ago

> The music industry figured this out: I pay Spotify, they have 95% of music content I could ever way, the UX is good enough. I have no reason to pirate music anymore.

> Why is this so hard for the film industry?

My theory is that the United States has compulsory licensing for music, but not movies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_license#United_Stat...

To my knowledge, a radio station or music streaming service doesn't have to negotiate with the record label to play a given song, they just have to pay a small royalty as defined by law. However, that doesn't hold true for movies. Each video streaming service has to negotiate the right to carry a given movie with the film studio that owns it. Those film studios play the streaming services against one another, often allowing the exclusive right to offer certain content for a limited time, after which they then lease the rights to a competing service.

jasode 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

>To my knowledge, a radio station or music streaming service doesn't have to negotiate with the record label to play a given song, they just have to pay a small royalty as defined by law.

The copyright holders can legally prevent their recordings from being streamed by Spotify. Famous examples were Taylor Swift and Neil Young withholding their music from Spotify.

For extra nuance, copyright holders can't stop cover songs from appearing on Spotify. So the Taylor Swift cover songs do have to pay compulsory license fees to her and her record label.

thejazzman 5 days ago | parent [-]

Swift withheld from Apple Music because they were giving it away for free and not paying her (or anyone); I don't recall it being kept off spotify?

4 days ago | parent | next [-]
[deleted]
brookst 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Source for the Apple Music claim?

Here's info about how and why Swift pulled her music from Spotif: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/taylor-swift-yanks-music-s...

Perhaps you'd mixed the two up?

thejazzman 4 days ago | parent [-]

https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-33220189

sofixa 5 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Those film studios play the streaming services against one another, often allowing the exclusive right to offer certain content for a limited time, after which they then lease the rights to a competing service.

Even worse, a lot of the big studios have their own streaming service (Disney, Paramount, Peacock, Canal+ in France, etc) and have no incentive to have lease the rights to competing services.

That's ultimately what pushed Netflix to focus so much on creating their content, they knew that at some point the original content owners will realise streaming can be lucrative, and just build their own services.

anon7000 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Yep. This kind of exclusivity agreement should probably be illegal across the board; they basically exist to make competition legally impossible. Great for business, sucks for people.

smegger001 3 days ago | parent [-]

I dont know, that means if a streaming service created a show they would be forced to share it meaning no incentive for them to make their own content I prefer a limited time exclusively of 3-5 years for first party content then compulsory licencing of content. That would incentivise creation of new content as a positive market differentiator but also decincentivise removing old content as it would in effect be a negative differentiator.